Food Trends: Making fresh homemade pasta

Magic Act

By John Adamian/Life@Home

Like many of the best things in life, delicious fresh pasta is really simple. It’s just flour and eggs. Food doesn’t get more basic.

Still, that doesn’t mean making fresh pasta at home is exactly easy. It can be a little intimidating for first-timers, as it requires some patience, a little muscle and some machinery. But it’s not like the dough is so delicate and unforgiving that you can’t mess around with it and feel your way through the process using mostly common sense. And — as with bread machines a few years back — it seems as if a lot of people have pasta machines/noodle makers that have been sitting collecting dust in a basement or a closet. If you don’t have one yourself, you’ll find that many of your foodie friends do, and they’re happy to loan them to atone for the guilt of never using it themselves.

Italians are serious about their pasta. And the venerable Italian ladies who pen the most beloved Italian cookbooks — cooks who can get very scornful on the subject of dried herbs or the liberal application of tomato paste or pre-grated cheese — are even more dictatorial than usual when the subject is fresh pasta. It is possible to hand-roll and hand-cut pasta, but that’s more exertion than most of us want to put into a weekend project.

Once you’ve borrowed a machine, the next hurdle is to overcome the intense self-doubt you’ll feel as soon as you start reading recipes for homemade pastas. I should say here that when I say “machine,” I’m talking only about the hand-cranked kind with parallel cylindrical rollers. Steer clear of other, more complicated “makers.” As cookbook author Marcella Hazan, one of the great stern purists, writes: “Do not be tempted by one of those awful devices that masticate eggs and flour at one end and extrude a choice of pasta shapes through another end. What emerges is a mucilaginous and totally contemptible product, and moreover, the contraption is an infuriating nuisance to clean.” So there.

There are stories about Italian pasta experts coming to give demonstrations in America and bringing their own eggs and flour, because the stuff we have here is evidently inferior. You’ll read people getting mystical about a certain kind of Italian flour known as 00, doppio zero. It’s super soft and slightly less gluten-y than American all-purpose flour, but not having access to it shouldn’t keep you from your project. And most of us can’t get a hold of Italian eggs.

To understand why pasta is taken so seriously by Italians, it helps to know that pasta-making techniques were handed down over the centuries, from daughters watching mothers. Pasta — with its funny shapes and names and the stories behind them — “wittily expresses anticlerical sentiments without a word being spoken,” writes Lynne Rossetto Kasper in her excellent The Splendid Table, about the cooking of the Emilia-Romagna region. She writes that “pasta often is so entrenched in tradition that one misstep in its preparation or presentation can outrage the most accommodating diners.” Well, this is may be one of those times where it’s nice to be in America, a land that has so successfully disregarded so many traditions (which helps explains our love of tortellini salad, a dish that Italians view as a kind of sacrilege.) We’re more likely to approach pasta making as a fun experiment than as some kind of exercise in centuries-old history. Which is just as well.

Making fresh pasta is a little like a cross between making bread and goofing around with Play-Do. It’s hard to do it without making a big mess. Having a nice spacious work station, or a sturdy table is fairly important. You’ll need some room to dry the pasta after it’s run through the machine. It’s definitely a job for wearing an apron, or at the very least, taking off your necktie or your loose clothing. And though you can do this by yourself, you might find that when it comes time to run the long thin pieces of uncut dough through the press, it’s helpful to have another set of hands to feed the pieces into the machine.

Another helpful pointer: When you’re starting — making that initial mound of flour in which you’ll scoop out a pool-like indentation into which you’ll crack your eggs — be sure to make the hole for your eggs deep. My egg mixture kept spilling out of the little depression I’d made, and this caused the entire operation to get messier than it might have otherwise.

Once past the initial stage of getting the egg and flour mixture to the right consistency, things get easier, smoother and a little more fun, as it becomes an extended effort in simply stretching and flattening the pieces of dough into long thin strips. This is when you’ll find yourself amazed at how a little fist-size ball of dough gets turned into eight or ten sheets of smooth dough, each about the length of your arm.

If you’ve got young children in the house, they’ll enjoy watching this process and maybe even “helping” out a little; my three-year-old liked cranking the handle on the machine.

When it’s time to cook the stuff, you may find yourself wondering what texture to aim for. And silky should be the guiding principle.

New Yorker writer Bill Buford wrote about his pasta experience in his book Heat, in which he learned, among other things, to work the fresh-pasta station at one of Mario Batali’s restaurants. “Fresh pasta is less fussy than dried, and the cooking objective is different: none of this al dente business,” writes Buford. “You want a food that’s soft and yielding, rather than one that resists your bite.”

I served my home-made fettucine with a simple sauce — the general wisdom is that you want something delicate and not too thick so as not to compete with the noodles. I sauteed minced garlic in three tablespoons of butter and threw in some chopped parsley. The noodles were velvety and wonderful, nothing like the stuff you buy in the store, not that there’s anything wrong with store-bought dry pasta. The act of turning eggs and flour into something so perfect is a kind of magic, and once you make your own pasta at home, you’ll feel a little bit like a wizard in the kitchen.

Fresh Pasta Recipe

courtesy Mario Batali and the Food Network

ingredients

3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

4 extra-large eggs

method

Mound the flour in the center of a large wooden cutting board. Make a well in the middle of the flour, add the eggs. Using a fork, beat together the eggs and begin to incorporate the flour starting with the inner rim of the well. As you incorporate the eggs, keep pushing the flour up to retain the well shape (do not worry if it looks messy). The dough will come together in a shaggy mass when about half of the flour is incorporated.

Start kneading the dough with both hands, primarily using the palms of your hands. Add more flour, in 1/2-cup increments, if the dough is too sticky. Once the dough is a cohesive mass, remove the dough from the board and scrape up any left over dry bits. Lightly flour the board and continue kneading for 3 more minutes. The dough should be elastic and a little sticky. Continue to knead for another 3 minutes, remembering to dust your board with flour when necessary. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and set aside for 20 minutes at room temperature. Roll and form as desired.

Note: Do not skip the kneading or resting portions of this recipe; they are essential for a light pasta.